Thick waste

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10 05 08 - 02:38 Eating a healthy diet has never been cheap, but now the prices are shooting up with the world food shortage. Readers cannot have failed to have heard the stories about food riots around the world and will be aware of the controversy surrounding the growing of biofuels on land that could have been used to grow crops for food.

Despite this, our increasingly obese population throws roughly a third of the food bought almost directly into the dustbin. Even I find that sometimes I have miscalculated the use by date on some sausages or suchlike, and have been forced to throw it away. None of us can be entirely apathetic about buying stuff and then dumping it. So why does it happen?

A lot of the time people buy too much and store it away, forgetting about it. I have done this too when I have seen a good offer on cereal or peanut butter for example! Usually then we just eat it stale, unless the flavour is disgusting.

It's important to calculate what you realistically will use and limit yourself to that. There are some foods you can stock up on that are especially long-life: rice, baked beans, canned fish, etc. After all - there could be an emergency sometime.

A lot of wastage comes from the inevitable leftovers on children's plates. Children have to be strictly encouraged to eat their food and not to ask for food they don't really intend to eat.

Organised events like parties and buffets always lead to wastage. It would be better for the caterer to err on the mean side rather than provide an obvious excess. Restaurants also dump a lot of unwanted food.

As the food shortages bite in more and more, we will be forced to realise the importance of efficiency and may one day end up so hungry that even you or I cannot rule out a future where we are reduced to looking for leftovers in the bins of the more fortunate. The world is becoming a less stable place and famine looms for millions, if not billions in the years to come.

So we must all try to improve our habits and stop filling landfills with a valuable resource.